


lonely tonight.

by outpastthemoat



Series: new testament [just more of the same 'verse] [14]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergence, Future Fic, M/M, Singer Salvage Yard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:48:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't meet Cas's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lonely tonight.

 

_Sometimes I dream that I have found a place_

_Where I don’t feel so all alone_

_Am I that lonely tonight, I don’t know_

Before Dean even opens his eyes, he feels Cas there beside him. There's a hand on his chest, touching the buttons of his shirt. Not undoing them. Just touching. The button at his throat, and then the next, and then all the way down. Dean moves his hand and rests it where the belt loops on Cas's jeans and his soft flannel shirt meet.  He feels Cas's thigh moving against his own as he shifts under Dean's hand, denim working against denim.  He can smell the gun oil on Cas’s flannel shirt, and it’s both the most familiar and the strangest sensation, all at the same time. 

Dean doesn’t look at him, but he skims his hand over Cas’s side, wondering at the way the wrinkles in Cas's shirt smooth down under his fingers, wondering at how close he is to Cas’s skin.  Cas makes a soft half-awake sound and Dean pulls back.  He doesn’t meet Cas’s eyes.    After a moment, he hears Cas let out a sigh, then slide out of bed. They don’t talk about it.  They don't say good morning.  He watches Cas walk across the room in his unbuttoned flannel shirt and his jeans hanging loose around his hips and his socks falling off his feet and catching on the small uneven gaps where the floorboards don't quite meet.

Cas opens the top drawer in Dean's dresser and takes Dean's clothes, a clean t-shirt, a pair of stiff, almost-new jeans.  This is what he does when he doesn't have clean clothes in his own dresser drawer, which is most of the time.  Dean follows him out of bed.  Cas bumps into him while pulling his shirt over his head, and Dean shoves him away with his shoulder without really thinking.  Cas lets out a tiny huff of air and moves away, and Dean knows he’s done something wrong.  He doesn’t know what it is, exactly.  Cas is getting dressed by his side.  He is removing his socks and shucking his jeans and leaving his clothes in little heaps around Dean’s room.  Dean almost wants to go around and pick them up, the dirty socks and the grease-stained jeans and the creased white t-shirt that all belong to Cas, and he wants to shove them away, under the bed or on the floor of the closet, buried behind a row of ancient jackets and winter coats.  He wants them out of sight.  There are things that Dean can only face in the darkness, and never by the light of day.  He puts on clean jeans and then a shirt and then a jacket and leaves Cas there, bare-chested and barefoot, standing in a patch of sunlight in the center of his bedroom.  Dean closes the door behind him.

He starts the coffee and starts breakfast.  He hears Cas walk into the kitchen.  He turns around and Cas is there, slowly working a shirt over his head and his shoulders and pulling the hem down to cover his stomach.  And then it's like the morning starts all over again, the blank new beginning of the kind of day Dean knows and understands, the kind of day with no surprises, no new discoveries.  He lets go of the breath of air he's been holding.

Dean drags a chair out for him at the table and goes to kiss his cheek, but Cas turns his face away, and the morning is everything the night is not and so Dean doesn't try to kiss him again.  He puts his hand on Cas's shoulder, instead, and hands him coffee and packets of Splenda and creamer from the drawer by the sink.

He walks around that day in a sort of waking dream. He rounds up the paint supplies and goes out on the roof and thinks, Cas kissed me. He might do it again, even.  He takes the shutters down and spreads them out on tarps on the garage floor and remembers how Cas's beard had scratched the side of his face when he laid his head down by Dean's on the pillow.  He puts his hand to his chest and touches the buttons on his shirt.  Cas had touched those buttons.  Dean thinks about it all day.  He wonders if it will happen again.  

Cas hangs around that evening, standing by Dean's door, not quite in the room, not quite in the hall.   He stands there, and they don't really talk, but Cas puts his hand on Dean's wrist.  Dean looks down, surprised and sure that the pressure on his arm won’t last long, but Cas leaves his hand there.  He runs his thumb over the thin skin over the veins and areries underneath for the span of a long quiet moment.  Cas puts his hand on Dean's hip.  Then the other.  Then he puts his face in the collar of Dean's shirt.  Somehow it's easier, like this.  Dean covers the back of Cas's neck with his palm.  Cas says into the space between Dean's throat and the worn flannel fabric, "Can I come in?"  

Dean can't answer.  He drops his hands, slides his fingers through Cas's belt loops and pulls him all the way inside.

\--

Cas closes his eyes while Dean’s kissing him, every time.  Dean wonders if he's thinking of something else.  Something else he should be doing, somewhere else he’d rather be.  Or maybe he just goes away, distant and unreachable, the way he gets lost sometimes.  Cas loses himself in front of the milk at the grocery store, holding the refrigerator door open until Dean comes back to their cart with eggs and beer and finds him standing there, motionless until Dean tugs Cas's hand off the handle and closes the door.  Cas loses himself in the middle of eating, fork poised halfway to his mouth and spaghetti falling in his lap.  Cas loses himself when Dean puts his arms around him, and Dean's left holding a warm empty vessel, with eyes sliding shut.  Dean tries to lure him back with hands and tongue.  Sometimes it's enough to bring Cas crashing back to earth and here again with Dean. Sometimes it’s enough to make Cas remember why he's here, to remember to kiss him back. Sometimes not.

He puts his mouth on Cas's neck, the hollow of his throat.  Cas wraps his hands around Dean's forearms and Dean learns how those work-rough hands feel moving up and down his skin.  He slides his hands underneath that flannel shirt and kisses the sliver of exposed flesh on Cas’s stomach.  Cas shivers under his hands.  Dean kisses him again anyway.  He starts with the hands.  He presses kisses to the swollen knuckles, to the rough calloused palms, he kisses the fingers that Cas has recently learn will not bend straight anymore, that he can only flex to a certain degree.  He kisses the pads of his fingers and the sides of his hands.

Cas doesn’t stop him exactly, but he looks away, somewhere off to the side of Dean's head and Dean does stop then.  He works his way back up and kisses the spot on the side of Cas’s neck where he’s recently learned makes Cas go quiet and considering.  Sometimes kissing that spot makes Cas kiss him back, slow and thoughtful, intent on Dean, focused on his hands and mouth and all those silent things Dean is saying with them.  He puts his hands on Cas’s face and learns how Cas’s beard catches on the callouses on his palm, his fingers.  He strokes the sides of Cas's face and waits.  He curls his fingers in the hair by Cas’s ear and waits.  Cas doesn't come back.

Dean takes his hands away.  He moves down on the bed beside him and puts his arms around Cas instead and starts talking.  He talks about paint.  About going back to Home Depot tomorrow.  About how Cas had better get up on time and be ready to go, because he needs to come along with Dean to pick out paint chips and finally make a decision on the goddamned color scheme.  About how Cas had better read up on accent colors, because they’ll need to repaint the shutters and the door, too, and how Dean doesn’t really know what’ll look good with gray.

Cas turns his head at that and his mouth comes so close to Dean’s ear.  He says, sort of mumbling, “Lots of colors go with gray.”

“Like what?”

“Um,” Cas says, thinking, and then, “Blue. Or yellow.”

“Blue or yellow.  You don’t know what you’re talking about.  What about red?”  Cas rests his head on Dean's shoulder and places his hand right where Dean's heart beats and and pretends to fall asleep, presumably to escape these difficult questions.

Cas is warm nearly everywhere, all except his nose and mouth and feet.  Dean slides his fingers under the cuffs of Cas’s flannel sleeves and grasps his wrist.  He can feel the pulse of Cas’s heart when he presses his fingers here, and here, if he runs his finger lightly against the skin of Cas’s wrist, he can feel the uneven raised scar Cas had won after catching his arm across a length of barbed wire while clearing a portion of the junkyard.  It had soaked the sleeve of Cas's shirt in blood, it had gotten infected three days later.  The cut had scarred, badly.  He traces the scar with the pad of his finger, starting at its origin on the flesh just under Cas’s thumb, curling parallel to the curve of the lifeline on Cas’s hand, curving down across his wrist and wrapping around the back of his hand.  

Cas forgets to be asleep.  He sighs at the touch.  It’s everything Dean has wanted.  It’s nothing like what he’d imagined at all.  He’s not even sure if he wants the same things anymore.  This is too different.  This is too strange.  This isn’t what he had pictured, not at all.  

The buttons on Cas’s shirt are digging into his chest.  He hadn’t been thinking of this when he had asked Cas to stay.  He hadn’t been thinking of small plastic buttons boring down against his collarbone, the rivets of Cas’s jeans pressing into his hipbone.   He wants very badly to turn over, to lie on his side, to turn his face away.  There are still too many things left unsaid, by either one of them.  The hard silence between them is a entity of its own, the third unwanted presence in this house.  If it were a real ghost, Dean could track it down, salt its bones, let it go.  There is no escaping the thing that lies between them.   

He looks down at Cas, faking sleep in his arms, his mouth almost touching the skin of Dean’s throat, his warm large hands curling around the dip in his lower back, the base of his spine.  He reconsiders. He presses the tips of his fingers into the nape of Cas’s neck, stroking the fine hairs there.  Dean doesn’t know what he’s doing.  Cas doesn’t know what he’s doing either.  He feels like a thief in the night, taking something from Cas that Cas might not even know he had to lose. 

Dean whispers nice things in his ear. He knows Cas is listening, even though his eyes are shut and his breathing is slow.  You needed me, he says to Cas.  To himself.  A reminder.  Even if you didn’t think you did.  You needed someone, and I love you, so it might as well be me.   I’ll always want you. I’ll always wait for you. Don't you forget, Cas. 

He touches Cas's hair for a while, curling his fingers around the tips of his hair long after Cas really does fall asleep. 

\--

Cas is there by his side during the days.  Cas follows him through the house, out to the porch, up on the roof.  He follows Dean around the junkyard, touching his elbow and pointing out all the projects he wants to take on this spring.  He takes Dean out to the edge of the junkyard, where the land makes a slight downhill shift towards the river.  He sticks his hands in the pockets of his jeans and tells him about trellises and raised beds and vine bores.  From what Dean undestands, vine bores are real devils and they fill Cas with righteous disapproval.  He wants tomatoes, he says.  Dean has a sudden image of thick green vines curling up and covering the stacks of junkers, growing up through the broken windows and wrapping around the steering columns, of picking tomatoes that have grown out of exhaust pipes.  He laughs, and Cas looks at him, affronted.  

"I think it's a good idea," Cas says, hunching his shoulders and frowning straight into the cold lines of the wind whipping the tail of his shirt up over his chest.

"I guess," Dean answers.  "If that's what you want."

Cas is looking at him, his face open and confused and maybe a little hurt, too.  "Are you mad at me?" he asks.

Dean braces himself against the wind, against Cas's worried, uncertain looks.  "What do I have to be mad about?"

Cas shoves his hands deeper in his pockets.  "I don't know."

"Well, I'm not," he says.  He shakes his head and abandons the daydream.  He thinks that it's just as likely that Cas will give up on gardening midway through, letting those tomatoes rot on the vine, the same way he leaves their other projects unfinished.  That broken door is still leaning against the wall in the hall.  There are still unpainted pieces of crown molding around the ceiling in the library.  Cas doesn't always finish what he starts. Cas stops in the middle of kissing him, sometimes, and just looks at Dean instead, until Dean can't take it anymore and pulls him back down, covers himself up with Cas's long lean body.  But then Cas will gently remove Dean's hands from clutching the back of his neck, tug Dean's fingers out of his hair, fold Dean's hands up in his own and say the strangest things.  Dean, Cas said to him in the gray light before dawn, Dean, don't you know what you want?"

Yeah, Dean replied, of course I do, I want this.  But that never seems to be the right answer.

He touches the long shaggy hair falling in Cas’s face.  He pushes Cas's hair out of his eyes, sort of shakily.  Cas gets a certain look on his face when Dean does that. He leans into Dean's hands and looks into Dean's eyes and looks  _thankful_.  Dean sees that look on Cas's face everytime he closes his eyes, and it scares him.  He wonders what he must look like to Cas, when Cas touches  _him_ , when Cas's hands are on  _him_ , when Cas is moving against him and inside him and looking down upon him, a star gazing down from the heavens.  He thinks about what Cas must see written all over his face, and he feels like he has been punched in the gut.  He closes his eyes.

\--

He follows Dean to his room in the evenings.  Dean doesn't know what to do with him.  Cas closes the door behind him, Cas slides under the sheets beside him and touches Dean's face in the dark, moving slowly.  Every move he makes is careful, considered.  He runs his hands over Dean's chest.  He touches Dean's collarbone, the hollows around his hips.  He kisses the crease of Dean's thighs, nips at the soft swell below his navel.  Dean lies there and lets Cas's hands move over him and sometimes holds his breath, afraid to make a sound, afraid to move.  And sometimes Cas will quietly take his hands away and touch his face to Dean's instead, fitting their cheeks together until Dean turns on his side and pulls the covers back up over his chest.

Somehow they’ve developed a habit of talking quietly before they fall asleep, shoulders pressed together, lying side-by-side on the bed.  Two sets of legs in faded jeans, the seams rubbing against each other, and oh, if Dean turns his head just so, he’ll feel the rush of air across his cheek as Cas lets out a light sigh. 

They talk around the silence.  They talk about the house, about painting and nail guns and sanding and re-staining the old oak kitchen table. They don’t talk about the silence.  Is it even there, or --? Dean shakes his head.  He knows Cas hears it too.  He can tell by the way Cas hesitates before he speaks sometimes, drawing his chin down to his chest, the corners of his mouths tight and pinched.  

Cas tries to talk to him, lying on his side, one hand on Dean’s hip.  He is saying something about the garage, about the shell of a Mustang someone wants refinished, and Dean isn’t listening. Cas is talking, but the silence is suffocating.  Cas is letting his fingers drift by his shoulder, up his neck, behind his ear.  Cas’s hand is warm and resting on his spine, stroking between his shoulder blades. 

“Dean,” Cas says.

“Yeah,” he says, and turns to lie down on his belly, tucking his arms around his head, putting his hands underneath the pillow.  He closes his eyes. The fingers stop moving. The pressure of Cas's touch vanishes.  Cas doesn’t say a word.  The mattress creaks.  Cas gets up and leaves.

Cas comes back into his room later that night.  Dean turns his head into the pillow, but Cas crawls into bed alongside him anyway.  "Dean," he is saying,  "what are you doing?  You keep pretending.  Like there isn't anything wrong.  

"You're always pretending.  Dean, you don't even like peppermints," he says, and Dean stays quiet, but Cas curls into his side.  He tucks in close behind Dean’s back and puts his chin on his shoulder and he wraps his arms around Dean’s chest.  Dean wants to protest.  He wants to say How could you think that, of course nothing's wrong.  Just stop talking.  Go away. Come back.  Don't make me say it out loud, please.  But Cas is holding him and this should be the best feeling in the world and it isn't and Dean keeps his eyes shut and his mouth closed and finally Cas sighs and lets him go.  

He puts his mouth against Dean’s cheek. It’s not a kiss. Something else. Cas hovers there for a moment, breathing, then retreats.  "Dean," Cas is saying, close by his ear.  Of all the things that need saying, this is what he whispers into Dean's hair.  "You love me," he says.  "I know that's not pretend."  

Cas doesn’t leave again.  Dean knows.  He wakes up with Cas sleeping with his hand on Dean’s chest, with his fingers wrapped around the edges of his shirt.  He moves Cas's hand off his chest and gets up.  He leaves Cas still asleep in the bed.

\--

Cas is kissing him, silent except for the sound of his breath against Dean’s cheek.  Cas's beard scratches his nose.  Dean lips at the rough hairs just on the side of Cas's mouth, drags his nose against the stubble on the underside of Cas's neck.  He can feel Cas's beard whenever he dips his head to kiss Dean on the back of his neck, on the shoulder, on the inside of his thighs.  Cas puts his hands everywhere.  He slides his hands in the back pockets of Dean's jeans.  He moves his hands under Dean's shirt and drags them down inside his jeans.

He is cradling Cas between his legs, he is holding Cas to his chest.  Through the darkness he can see the outline of Cas's profile when he turns his head, just so.  Even in the darkness he can tell that Cas is looking at him.  Even in the darkness he can see what Cas is feeling, in Cas's eyes, in the sad patient lines of his face.  Dean had always thought this would be the kind of moment they would face together, eyes wide open, looking straight and solemn at each other.  He doesn't know when it became like this.  Everything between them is all wrong, and he's been trying so fucking hard to make everything right. He can't keep seeing that look on Cas's face.  He closes his eyes.  

He takes Cas’s face between his palms instead and kisses his eyes, the bridge of his nose, and he can feel Cas blinking at his touch. Dean can feel the brush of his eyelashes against his cheek.  He rubs his nose the side of his face , and Cas sways in his arms as he runs his cheek along Cas’s jaw, kisses along the curve of his ear, and when he finally brings his mouth down to meet Cas’s, it feels almost the way it should've felt all along.

"Dean," Cas is saying. He lays a hand on Dean's face, his thumb stroking just below Dean's eye.  "Dean.  Look at me."  He can't.

"This is wrong," he says, and waits for Cas to let go.  But he doesn't.  Cas stays where he is, curling over him protectively.  Whatever else they are, they are still somehow able to breathe in sync.  Dean can feel Cas's chest move in time with his own.  Cas is warm and sticky with sweat and his pulse is fluttering in the veins of his neck by Dean's mouth. He can feel Cas sighing, tight and anxious. He can't imagine what Cas must think.  That Dean doesn't like him anymore, or something.  That he's doing something wrong.  But Cas is doing everything right and it's Dean who's wrong, all wrong.  "What's the matter?"

“I’m not happy,” Dean says, a ghost of a whisper, but his voice cracks somehow, going higher, a thin, keening sound that he never knew he could make.  He wishes with every fiber of his being that he could swallow back that sound he had made, that he could gulp it back and chase it back down his throat into the darkness.  “I thought I would be happy,” he says, and there’s that noise again, breaking in the quiet stillness of the room, and Cas's arms are gathering around him, moving closer, holding him together.

"You don’t have to be happy, Dean,” he says.  And he rocks Dean like that, Dean, lost and stupid and whimpering and still making that sound.  “How,” Dean asks him, “How is it that you can be happy with this and I can’t, what is wrong with me--?”

“Nothing,” Cas is saying, “Dean, Dean, oh. There is nothing the matter with you.”

“I thought I’d be happy with you," he is saying and Cas is holding him, cupping his face in his hands, trying to see Dean's face.  Trying to understand.  “Why am I not happy? I’ve got you and a home and Sam’s all right, so why can’t I just be happy?  Cas, I got everything I wanted.”

“Sometimes it’s not that simple,” Cas says.  

“I thought,” Dean says, “that you hadn’t noticed.”

“I always notice you.”

He tilts his head and waits for Cas to kiss him and Cas does, oh, he does.  It's still not exactly how he'd thought it would be.  He pulls away from Cas's mouth.  "It's supposed to be perfect," he says, and Cas pauses over him.  "I thought it would make everything better.

“It’s not perfect,” Cas says.  “But I think I might have found you.  Here.  In one of these moments.  If we could go to heaven.”

Dean lies there in Cas's hold and breathes deep and thinks that if they could go to heaven, yeah, this might be his choice too.  if that was a choice they could make together, he'd choose it, too.  If that was a choice they still had a chance to make.  It hurts, knowing that Cas would chose him like that. It hurts knowing that Cas never will get to make that choice.  He asks, finally, "You would have looked for me?"

"Of course I would, Cas says.  "I always do."

He says, "I would have looked for you, too.  No matter how long it took.  I would look until I found you."

"I know," says Cas, and he rests his forehead on Dean's, so that Dean could look him right in the eye, if he wanted.  And Dean wants to, he does.  "You always do."

 


End file.
